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Chancellor Jeremy Hunt woke up on Tuesday to much better UK public finances data than expected. Public borrowing remains high, but is £30bn lower than anticipated 10 months into the 2022-23 financial year. Improvements in the public finances are a double-edged sword for Hunt. He now has a £30bn windfall, according to data from the

Around the pandemic, a small corner of the business world had a Linda Evangelista moment. Except the supermodel came pretty cheap. Evangelista said in 1990 that elite catwalkers didn’t “wake up for less than $10,000 a day”. A small club of company bosses couldn’t rouse themselves without the chance of a future payout of £100mn.

Joe Biden heaped blame on Vladimir Putin for waging a war of “choice” in Ukraine that Russia will “never” win, as the US president sought to rally the west for a long and bloody campaign to defend democracy in Kyiv. Speaking against the backdrop of Warsaw’s Royal Castle, Biden delivered a keynote speech that directly

Israeli politics is in crisis. A large number of people have demonstrated on the streets against the rightwing coalition’s extensively criticised “judicial reforms”. The president, Isaac Herzog, has even declared that “We are no longer in a political debate but on the brink of constitutional and social collapse.” The programme of this government is of

The Treasury has received record tax receipts across income, capital gains and inheritance taxes over the past year but tax experts warned this was unlikely to prompt cuts in personal tax rates in next month’s Budget. Self-assessed income tax receipts reached £21.9bn in January, jumping one-third on the previous year, boosted by frozen thresholds, inflation

President Vladimir Putin has not only doubled down on his war of aggression in Ukraine but mapped a course for domestic politics, the economy and culture that reaffirms his goal of achieving a decisive break between Russia and the west. Putin’s state of the nation speech on Tuesday offered no hope that he would wind

Vladimir Putin has said Russia will suspend its last remaining nuclear weapons treaty with the US, a move western officials said spelt the end of the post-cold war arms control regime. In a state-of-the-nation address ahead of the first anniversary of his invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president said Moscow would freeze its participation in

Business activity in the eurozone grew faster than expected in February, strengthening the rebound from last year’s energy crisis and reinforcing calls for the European Central Bank to keep raising interest rates to tackle high inflation. S&P Global’s flash eurozone composite purchasing managers’ index, a measure of activity in manufacturing and services, rose to 52.3

Eighteen months ago, this profession of mine had Sir Keir Starmer down as a loser. Now that his UK Labour party is 20 points ahead in the polls, we are doing the gracious thing. We are telling him why he isn’t further in front. He “must be brave”. He “must be more radical”. His party

China has warned western countries against “adding fuel to the fire” in Ukraine and reiterated calls for peace talks ahead of an expected visit to Moscow by Beijing’s most senior diplomat Wang Yi. The comments, from foreign minister Qin Gang, came as Beijing moved to institutionalise its so-called Global Security Initiative, a proposed alternative international

European stocks fell on Tuesday following the latest indication that the region’s economy is in better health than expected, leaving central banks scope for further monetary tightening. The Europe-wide Stoxx 600 and Germany’s Dax fell 0.8 per cent. France’s CAC 40 lost 0.7 per cent. The declines came after closely watched surveys of private sector

Jeremy Hunt has received an unexpected £30bn windfall in the public finances ahead of his March Budget, giving the chancellor scope to provide extra support for energy bills, keep fuel taxes down and potentially solve public sector strikes. In figures that surprised economists and the Treasury, the Office for National Statistics said the public sector

HSBC raised its dividend to the highest level in four years and said it might make a special payout next year, as it seeks to fend off break-up calls from its largest shareholder Ping An. The UK- and Hong Kong-listed bank also said it would consider share buybacks sooner than expected. The moves came as

The sanctioned Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin generated revenues of more than a quarter of a billion dollars from his global natural resources empire in the four years before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, according to corporate records. A Financial Times investigation has found that years of western sanctions against the Wagner mercenary group’s founder failed

If you make your living telling other people what to buy online, “de-influencing” might sound like a direct threat. The trend of glossy videos advising users not to waste their money on Dyson Airwrap hair stylers, Ugg Minis, AirPods Max earphones or Olaplex shampoo has been hailed as a challenge to over-consumption and a return

Brussels is drawing up a proposal to use the EU budget to pre-finance purchases of weapons and ammunition, in what would be an unprecedented foray into the defence industry designed to speed up arms supplies to Ukraine. The European Commission is exploring how it could leverage the bloc’s budget to provide downpayments to arms manufacturers

The chief executive of Vanguard has defended his decision to pull the world’s second largest asset manager out of an industry-wide alliance to tackle climate change, saying the group’s “voice was being drowned out”. In December, Vanguard resigned from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, a coalition of 301 asset managers committed to reducing greenhouse

The British Business Bank wants greater independence to become a UK “sovereign growth fund” that can reinvest proceeds from its venture capital investments, according to its new chief executive. In an interview with the Financial Times, Louis Taylor called on ministers to make key decisions on the future of the state-owned economic development investor, including

At a small rural farm about an hour’s drive from the Zambian capital city of Lusaka in late January, US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen stood before a gathering of farmers and told them she understood the destruction that global warming was causing. “We know that over the past decade, storms, floods, and droughts in Africa

Campaigners have called on the UK government to freeze household energy costs beyond the end of March as falling wholesale prices sharply reduce the amount of government subsidy needed to hold bills steady. The average UK household bill is set to rise to £3,000 per year between April and June under the energy price guarantee

Less than half of the financial aid pledged to Ukraine by the west has actually reached Kyiv since Russia’s invasion last year, according to analysis of international financial support. Ukraine’s finance ministry received €31bn by December 2022 of the €64bn promised by western countries after Russia launched its full-scale attack last February, research by the